My father arrived in the US
as a refugee in 1938. But he was the wrong kind, because he was a Jew. Although
thousands of Jewish refugees from the Nazis were able to enter the US, official
US policy did not welcome them. The State Department put so many barriers in
the way of Jews trying to escape from Nazi Germany that the official yearly
quota of immigrants from Germany was not filled from 1933 to 1938. That quota
itself was part of the long American history of distinguishing between “good”
and “bad” immigrants based on race.
There were no immigration
restrictions in the new American republic, but only the good kind of people
could become citizens – white people. Slaves were excluded from citizenship by
the Constitution. In 1790, Congress restricted new citizenship to “any
Alien being a free white person”.
Blacks who were already free
were barred from entering
the Southern slave states. Whites in Illinois, like many northern states,
did not want African Americans either, so they not only denied the citizenship rights
to blacks already in Illinois, but also discouraged slaveowners from freeing
their slaves in Illinois.
A new kind of bad people
began to pour into the US in the 1840s, 2
million Irish fleeing the famine. About the same number of Germans
immigrated to America in the middle of 19th century, but the Germans
were mostly good Protestants and the Irish were bad Catholics. A popular
movement developed to fight off the Irish hordes under the banner of
patriotism. In 1849, a secret
society of Protestant men in New York called the Order of the Star Spangled
Banner sought to recreate an America of “Temperance, Liberty and Protestantism”.
They grew into the American Party, often called the “Know Nothings”.
In 1857, the Supreme Court
pronounced what it hoped was a definitive statement about bad immigrants in the
Dred Scott case: descendants of slaves brought to the US could never become
citizens, because black people were “so far inferior, that they
had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” That ruling lasted
only until Lincoln
promulgated the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and the states passed the 14th
amendment exactly 150 years ago.
Almost immediately another dangerous
foreigner threatened white America, Chinese laborers imported to construct
the transcontinental railroad in the West. California laws prevented Chinese
immigrants from becoming citizens, and popular sentiment was whipped up against
the Chinese by labeling them sexual predators taking jobs away from white
Americans. Congress in 1882 passed the first immigration act targeting a
particular ethnic group, the Chinese Exclusion Act prohibiting
all immigration of Chinese laborers.
Racist immigration restrictions
are typically fearful reactions to changes in actual immigration. At the end of
the 19th century, floods of immigrants from southern and eastern
Europe, including millions of Jews, brought a backlash of demands to stop such
bad immigrants. Congress eventually responded in 1917 with an “Asiatic
Barred Zone” which excluded all Asians, except for Japanese and residents
of the US colony of the Philippines. In 1924, a more comprehensive quota system
favored good immigrants from western and northern Europe; not-so-good
immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were limited, and all Asians were
barred. The quotas were designed so that 86% of immigrants came from
northwestern Europe and Scandinavia.
The Immigration Act of 1924
remained in force through World War II, although extralegal restrictions had to
be employed to prevent too many Jews from Germany from entering the US. This
and the entire history of immigration restrictions accurately represented
American public opinion, at least among the white majority, where racist
stereotypes of dangerous non-white foreigners mixed with fears of job
competition. A Gallup poll in November 1938, two weeks after the Nazis
destroyed Jewish synagogues, businesses and homes, and sent 30,000 Jews to
concentration camps during Kristallnacht, asked Americans: “Should we allow a
larger number of Jewish exiles from Germany to come to the United States to
live?” 72%
said, “No.”
The human disasters of World
War II, including but not limited to the Holocaust, changed American opinion
about refugees. Jewish refugees were admitted in increasing numbers after 1945,
and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 abolished nationality quotas.
For the first time in our history, American laws reflected the sentiments
inscribed on the Statue
of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to
breathe free”. Congress overwhelmingly passed the bipartisan
Refugee Act of 1980, declaring the “historic policy of the United States to
respond to the urgent needs of persons subject to persecution in their
homelands.” Since then the US has taken in 3
out of every 4 refugees resettled across the world.
Donald Trump began his
campaign by insulting Mexicans and promising to ban Muslims. He is leading the
reversal of American openness and a return to our earlier racially-based
immigration. Although we still accepted more refugees than any other country in
2017, for the first time we accepted less than the rest of the world. Canada,
Australia, and Norway accepted more than five times as many refugees per capita
as the US.
The pulling apart of
asylum-seeking families is only the most inhumane aspect of this repudiation of
what has made America great. We are retreating to the worst aspects of our
history. The richest nation on earth will no longer be the most generous.
Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
Published in the Jacksonville
Journal-Courier, July 17, 2018
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